Selfies exhibitions, Instagram performance ... Digital art enters the museum

Experiments, performance, conversations in images: fields open by phones and social networks in self -representation and the world allow all creative experiences.Artists do not hesitate.Whether they use smartphone as a classic camera or a new medium, they revisit its use in a thousand ways - starting with instant self -portraits, which Anglo -Saxons quickly baptized selfies.

Relayed by social networks, this practice has gained considerable magnitude, reaching the ribs of museums and festivals.The Saatchi, London gallery, has devoted a recent exhibition to him, from selfie to self-expression, which swept the history of the self-portrait, from the great masters of the past to a competition of the best selfie ... in April,A pop-up exhibition, The Museum of Selfies, will open its doors in Los Angeles.Interactive, playful, it offers, in bulk, to revisit the history of the selfie and to enter the book of records, with the longest selfie pole in the world, revealed the day of the opening.It is precisely this selfie stick, which usually makes museums, that the Lianzhou photography festival, in China, put at the heart of its latest edition, at the end of 2017.

Among the artists exhibited, Amalia Ulman, a young woman with the dazzling career who made Instagram the theater of her art. En 2014, elle construisaitExcellences & Perfections,performance controversée, ironique et décalée qui a trompé followers et critiques : une semi-fiction à base de selfies qui laissait croire qu’elle avait adopté un style californien outré à grand renfort de chirurgie esthétique, de mode de vie healthy et de shopping.Presented at the Tate in 2016 in the Exhibition FEFORMING FOR THE CAMERA, alongside artists like Nadar, Francesca Woodman, Eikoh Hosoe or Cindy Sherman, this series devoted it as a pioneer of digital art.At the Lianzhou festival, she showed another work, privileges, who questions pregnancy and her avatars ... By her side, among others, Shang Liang, 30, started photography to illustrate her own life, before meeting, inevitably, before the lens.The result ?More than a thousand selfies in five years.

That a young generation of artists plays with naturalness of his image only half surprise, but the stars of the genre also get into it: last August, Cindy Sherman, the queen of the diverted self -portrait, opened to thepublic his Instagram account, hitherto private.The artist, who declares to hate selfies in an article in magazinew, however plays the game thoroughly: in her distorted, funny or disturbing self -portraits, she makes herself unrecognizable using all the devices - filters, retouching, distortions, makeup and othersLAGS - that different applications offer.It demonstrates, if needed, that if the selfie can be distant from a sublimation of oneself, it is also the instrument of a reinvention.

Converse in pictures

The smartphone has changed the classic use of the phone, sliding from verbal communication to the exchange of texts and especially images.Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram have become the platforms of a new art of conversation.This is the subject of a remarkable exhibition that has just been held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists Mounts the visual conversations that artists have held, on a proposal by Mia Fineman,Conservative at the Met."I wanted to show smartphone photography for ten years," she says.But I did not find the right angle, until I think of the way people use images today to communicate with each other ".

She selected twelve artists, from all horizons, and asked them to choose a partner to start a conversation without text and without any rule than that of using their phone and images.The result surprised him by his variety, his quality, his relevance: the painters Cynthia Daignault Daniel Heidkamp, for example, created canvases that they have photographed;Tony Oursleret William Wegman only exchanged by videos;Manjari Sharma and Irina Rozovskyont discovered that they were both speakers at the same time;After the election of Donald Trump, Laura Poitras put an end to her conversation with Teju Cole, who continued to send him images of consoleur flowers ... The exhibition has excited criticism."One of the most learned, the most relevant and revealing Museum exhibitions of summer," said Lenew York Times.

The conversation can also be established afterwards, materialized by the gaze of others.In 2016, the French publishing house had the good idea to bring together, in the same book, the images, taken with an iPhone, of two photographers, the Australian Katrin Koenning and the Bangladais Sarker Protick.The two artists each led to their side to the obvious similarity, evoking a dreamlike daily life transformed by the light into fantasy figures.The book, black stars, was a nice success, as is the stand of the East Wing Dubai gallery, which exhibited these images in the last Paris Photo, in November.

Young talents

Telephone in hand, everyone becomes a photographer (with more or less happiness) and can show their shots on Instagram or elsewhere.Professionals have so well taken the measure of this practice that they launch their own tools to encourage virtuosos of the genre.Thus, the Getty Images agency has created a scholarship for photographers who use Instagram in order to echo under-represented communities.Among them, Girma Berta.The young Ethiopien street photographer, winner of the Stock Exchange in 2016, at 26, exhibited his very graphic images at the last La Gacilly festival, in Brittany, or on the stand of the Addis Fine Art gallery during the AKAA fair, in Paris.

For its part, the brand of telephone Hua Wei, whose optical quality developed with Leica is unanimous, exhibited in Paris Photo the portraits of the Swedish Anton Renborg taken with a smartphone.Huawei multiplies initiatives to promote future artists, from the interactive exhibition of New York Billy Kidd, in Arles, to the creation of a gallery rue Montmartre, in Paris, through competitions to spot young talents.

Historical continuity

Does the smartphone introduce a radical break in the history of the medium?"No, answers François Cheval, ex-director of the Nicéphore-Niépce museum, from Chalon-sur-Saône, and co-director of the museum backed at the Lianzhou festival.The use of smartphone is a popular, universal, personal and collective practice. Jamais, dans l’histoire de la photo, il n’y a eu tant de possibilités, c’est extraordinaire» ! Ainsi, le photographe italien Pietro Privitera montrait à Paris Photo, sur le stand de Photo & Contemporary, un extrait deWunderkamp,une œuvre en soi créée sur Instagram.For two years, he composed his own search for the perhaded time with an image posted per day, transformed with filters and software that he has developed, without using any other tool than his smartphone.This connoisseur of the history of the photo then compared his images with those of famous artists, starting from the principle that his gaze is unconsciously inscribed in that of his predecessors.

From network to gallery, images from smartphones always follow the same path.This is also, according to François Cheval, a classic relationship to the support: “Photographers continue to want to see their work materialized by the production of an object, like a draw or a book, it is the logic ofmarket and art world.Recognition always involves the exhibition ".

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